A View From Inside the OLPC Project

icknay writes "Here's an interesting rant on the OLPC from someone who worked there, including: 'The core mistake of the present Sugar approach is that it couples phenomenally powerful ideas about learning — that it should be shared, collaborative, peer to peer, and open — with the notion that these ideas must come presented in an entirely new graphical paradigm. We reject this coupling as untenable. Choosing to reinvent the desktop UI paradigm means we are spending our extremely over-constrained resources fighting graphical interfaces, not developing better tools for learning.' I have an OLPC, and the OS itself seems quite unfinished. I buy the argument that it would be better to focus on Sugar as educational software, and let it run on Linux, Windows, whatever."

Comments

Uh, isn't that the whole point?

[Coopjust]

I buy the argument that it would be better to focus on Sugar as educational software, and let it run on Linux, Windows, whatever.

Isn't that the whole point of it being distributed with free educational software? No propietary software restrictions, copyright infringement for sharing programs, no licenses, no future lock in? It seems to me that this insider can't see past the fact that MS wants to subsidize Windows on the OLPC to lock in a new customer base...

Re:Uh, isn't that the whole point?

[chris_sawtell]

The whole point of XP on XO is that Microsoft cannot stand up commercially if it ever becomes generally accepted knowledge that there are other O/Ss for small computers which work just as well, if not better than Microsoft products. This is what really gives Bill Gates and Steve Balmer serious laundry problems during the day and horrendous dreams at night. They just cannot allow that to happen.

Where the OLPC people are really in la-la land is thinking that the pupils and their teachers are going to be able to produce the course/learning software modules for themselves. The first world has failed spectacularly in that department, I'd really love to think the third world is going to be able to show up the first world as a bunch of ninnies in this regard, but I fear not.

After watching my son's schools futzing around with both desktop and laptop machines, in my not so humble opinion, laptops in primary schools are a complete waste of time, money and effort, and of very questionable value in secondary ones. Useful for teachers to keep records and to produce teaching materials, but for the pupil's use, no.

It matters not one jot who wrote either the GUI or the underlying O/S, because that's al hidden under the course-ware, which is what counts.

Overheard from a reporter embedded in OLPC

[BadAnalogyGuy]

"help! I'm stuck! Someone open the case!"

middle ground

[nguy]

I think plopping a full-blown Gnome or KDE desktop on the OLPC would be a mistake: those desktops work poorly on small screens, and they are incredibly obscure for new users (although no more obscure than Windows and Macintosh).

I think there's a middle ground, though: reuse the Gnome desktop infrastructure but replace the window manager with something simpler that prevents the usual beginner mistakes (losing windows behind each other, moving windows off-screen, etc.).

As for Windows on OLPC, I don't get it. Even if you run Windows+Sugar on the OLPC, you won't be able to install commercial software or commercial drivers with it, Windows books won't apply, and realistically you won't be able to run Microsoft's development tools on the OLPC either. But you will alienate lots of OLPC contributors, and you'll saddle yourself with an OS over which OLPC has no control, and Microsoft secretly probably just wants to kill the whole project anyway.

Re:middle ground

[Alex Belits]

think plopping a full-blown Gnome or KDE desktop on the OLPC would be a mistake: those desktops work poorly on small screens, and they are incredibly obscure for new users (although no more obscure than Windows and Macintosh). I already have a version of Ubuntu with Xfce that has default configuration designed to be usable on those laptops -- it's my development/mobile-device configuration. I even went as far as re-painting icons from Human theme green, so they don't clash with colors usable on a white-and-green laptop. The goal was to:

1. Port a Debian-based distribution with good hardware support, development and "mainstream" connectivity tools.
2. Make configuration suitable for a person who is accustomed to "traditional" windowing systems.
3. Demonstrate that if Windows on OLPC laptops is addressing a problem, that problem is already solved better by using existing free software.

So far I find that laptop perfectly usable -- in fact, for some things it ended up being better because slow Flash annoyed me enough to add a script, mplayer configuration and rebuilt clive package, so Youtube works in fullscreen without glitches. On my regular laptop I did not bother, and just accepted that I have to use Flash plugin with it craptastic performance on videos.

I've been underwhelmed by Sugar

[dpbsmith]

I've been disappointed and underwhelmed by Sugar in the form that it was delivered on the G1G1 units.

Now, I'm not a kid, and I've been brain-warped by decades of exposure to the Mac, but I really feel a lot of cognitive dissonance between Sugar's stated design goals and what's actually been delivered.

For example, one of Sugar's key design principles is "recoverability," and it says "However, the primary and essential means of recoverability remains the ability to undo one's actions."

Nevertheless, the keyboard has no marked "undo" key, and very, very few of the Sugar's activities appear to support any kind of "undo" facility.

Similarly, I've read the theory of how the Journal is supposed to work, and I may be wrong--I don't have any kids to try it on--but as nearly as I can tell, the only way you can find past Journal entries is by a very left-brained search capability that requires you to have labeled each Journal entry as you make it.

There's a long essay on how the Journal is supposed to work... revolutionary, non-hierarchical, etc. But I've found "tagging" to be a royal, royal pain. It's all very well to say that "Tagging will become a fundamental process for all types of data and activities on the laptops. Fortunately, children have a natural inclination to describe their world and the things they see and do." As I say, I haven't watched kids use the thing and maybe they "get" it, but I find it extremely hard to envision a ten-year old typing in tags every time he creates a journal entry.

While I'm intrigued by the idea of a GUI that is new from the ground up and informed by a fresh way of looking at things... to tell the truth my main motivation for participating in G1G1 was to experience Sugar... I'm quite disappointed by what's actually been achieved.

Right now, Sugar is a program launcher, no better than the Apple Dock or the Windows Tray... and to this aging brain, at least, the Journal simply doesn't work very well. Much less well than the Mac Finder as it existed in 1984, for example.

However, the problem is that I think open source is a key educational feature for OLPC. The concept of a "view source" button thrilled me. I grew up at a time when you could take the back off a TV set and see the tubes inside, and smash a tube in a vise and see the plate and filament and so forth inside. Maybe I couldn't build a TV or modify a vacuum tube, but just the conceptual readiness of looking inside was terribly important.

I was disappointed in the absence of a working "View Source" button in the G1G1 build. I think it's very important that all the code in the XO be open for inspection, and that definitely includes the GUI. So however bad Sugar is, I think it would be a disaster to replace it with a proprietary GUI.

I wrote about software problems in my OLPC review

[detroitindustrial]

..for the Register. The review is here.

Amateurs talk strategy...

[edremy]

Professionals talk logistics.

It's an old military saying, and it's right. By far the most damning bits in his article don't deal with Sugar, Windows or anything else- they deal with the utter and total lack of planning on the part of the deployment folks. (Err, folk) The fact that they had virtually no plan, no infrastructure and no supply chain management indicates to me that they were simply not living in the real world- any Army 2LT could have sat down with them and explained how they were about to fail. How you get to a point where you have a quarter of a million pieces of hardware sitting around with no coherent way to get them to the people who actually need them is beyond me. Why didn't they hire a pile of old brigade S4s? You know, folks who actually have experience getting stuff to people out in the middle of nowhere?

I've been tremendously disappointed by the entire project- the goals were wonderful, the hardware ended up pretty nice, the software has ended up pretty meh, but the overall project seems to be run by pie-in-the-sky idealists, Open Source fanatics and others for whom the real world is a place they only visit from time to time.

I'm confused

[jmorris42]

I'm seeing this same thing on every recent article about OLPC. Can someone help me understand?

1. OLPC repeats and repeats they are committed to Sugar.

2. OLPC then says they are unhappy with Sugar and are replacing Linux with Windows... because they are unhappy with Sugar.

3. OLPC says they are going to port Sugar to Windows.

So let me see if I understand where they are coming from. The think Sugar is a mistake so they are going to solve the problem by porting it to Windows and switching the underlying OS from Linux to Windows.

WTF! Am I the only person who gets braincramps trying to parse the doublespeak coming from OLPC?

Re:We are not in the dark.

[nuzak]

> There's a lot of spin and intentional ignorance here and it spills out best when he says this:

Spin? Spin is what organizations do to put bad news back "on message". This is one guy, ranting. One guy who was really involved, who went out to do the deployments to places that make the term "backwater" seem a goddam metropolis, and one guy who is really bitter about what he saw. If you read about, oh, one or two paragraphs more, it's quite obvious he doesn't think XP is going to save what he considers a fundamentally doomed project.

Imagine your IT department deployed 40,000 laptops (that's about as many people as work for Microsoft) and didn't have one single person on the payroll to actually deploy the things into the field. Now imagine that in Peru.

Re:Pretty much.

[nuzak]

Did you even bother to read the rest of the article? He doesn't even want XP on the OLPC. What he wants is some focus on the application usability in order to further constructivist learning, regardless of the operating system underneath. The damn thing ships with Squeak, the apps are written in python, and they SHOULD manage to run on any platform.

I think most people read about a page in, then rushed back to slashdot to muster their defense of Free Software and Fight The Good Fight, and well, pretty much proved his point: OLPC's mission is being lost by people who care more about meta-issues than either the learning mission (enabled by the software, not really the kernel) or the ongoing viability of the project itself (deployments need support!)

Peru may soon be stuck with 40,000 doorstops. Maybe I'll go take a look at Sugar and see if any of the ideas are worth lifting for a groove-like P2P network.

Re:We are not in the dark.

[DECS]

When Apple approached OLPC about basing its mini laptop on a light version of Mac OS X, it was rebuffed because the project wanted everything to be fully open source and unfettered with proprietary software. Now it's ready to put Windows on the XO?

With Mac OS X, the XO would have a native environment for running free software including Sugar, along with or in addition to running commercial Mac software. Unlike clone PCs, there's no vast range of hardware to support. Development tools are simpler and Apple currently has no business plan for selling its dev tools. That seems to make far more sense than slapping on a OS designed primarily to run on full sized, corporate desktops with expensive Office software licensing.

It's too bad OLPC set such lofty ideals about open development, setting itself up to drop them immediately and become yet another extension of a monopoly that doesn't have the technical merits to run on low cost mobile devices.

iPod Game Console, Tablet at WWDC? Highly Unlikely

Re:The problem with OLPC and Windows

[yomegaman]

When I grew up we had no idea what free software was, all we had were our Apple II's, C64's, etc, that were pretty much 100% proprietary. Yet, we somehow learned about computers by reading books and writing our own programs in the cruddy BASIC interpreters they came with. A kid with XP, Java/Python/what-have-you, and the Internet is a million times better off than we were. I swear, some of you people act like it's a tragedy if someone grows up not knowing Bourne shell scripting. The platform you learn on isn't that important, as long as you are learning the concepts.

PS: Besides, you can use a computer to learn about things other than the computer itself, right?

Re:We are not in the dark.

[ozmanjusri]

Governments are not selfless enough to want to actually "help" someone. They mostly just send aid and "help" to entrap the downtrodden and desperate.

While it's sad that Ivan believes OLPC has lost sight of it's goals, you might want to keep an eye on what's happening with OLPC Australia.

The Rudd government is looking at providing sponsored laptops for children. OLPC has set up an Australian office as a consequence. Jeff Waugh has been appointed board director, and seems to understand the issues well.

"The easy answer to that question is that at the moment Windows doesn't exist on the machine," says Waugh. "It is completely irrelevant to the value of what the whole project is all about. OLPC Australia has been set up without that ever being on the agenda. The core principal that's repeated often about the project is that it's an education project not a laptop project. Part of delivering on that idea is the open source platform. The community built around the not only the technology but also the content and the use of the device. There is a community angle that permeates everything on what the device, how it works for kids and that sort of stuff.

"I have no idea as to why Windows is regarded as relevant to this and some of the stuff in the press about running Sugar on Windows and things like that - well Windows is just an operating system that doesn't deliver on the vision of OLPC."

I have no doubt that Microsoft will attempt to subvert this project, as it does everything else, but so far, the Rudd government has delivered on most of their promises.

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